I have a dream, a speech made by Martin Luther King Jr made into a children's book, which helps young children understand racism and the worldview of Martin Luther King Jr.
Rachel and Angela, the writers and illustrators of I have a dream - kids addition. We are taking a deep dive into the importance of this famous speech and its impact on the children when they read our book about it.
Firstly, we annotated the entire speech with a transcript found online, which was an important part of our project because we needed to fully understand the deeper meanings to be able to know what to put in our book. Finding out halfway through the notes that there are complicated words that are hard to understand even for grade eight students, it made us realize that a children's book is more than needed. We noticed the literary devices contained in the speech, there were a lot of metaphors and similes, as well as repetition where Martin Luther King Jr would repeat a phrase over and over to get it in the audience's head.
Eventually, we finished the first step, and then we moved on to some background research. We watched a video of his speech on YouTube and searched for some factual information on the web in case we need it in our picture book.
While doing the annotations, I (Angela) worked on a worksheet provided by Ms. Quinn, which is developing the skills to find the tone and mood. Some of the tones and moods I found are courageous, inspiring, determined, and hopeful.
When we felt ready, we started the exhale by planning out a rough draft of how our story will go. Since this will be a non-fiction picture book, we had to include some factual pieces of information. We then did the good copy, which included colourful illustrations of the context, and simple sentences that replaces the metaphors used in the original speech.
We also took the time to write acknowledgments for each of us on our own. Which went on the very last page of the book. Some other book-like features such as the author, a summary, and the copyright symbol were also added to make it more professional.
It was really fun for us to complete this project as we both like to draw and write. We thought a lot about how to make it easier to understand for young children and we are proud of what we've done.
Click HERE to watch a read-out-loud video of the picture book.